Monday, August 20, 2012

That dirty old bastard

I love Picasso.Not because he was a celebrity when I was a child, between Warhol and
Picasso, the two…

I love Picasso’s late work, its abrasiveness, its brashness,
its playfulness and in the end despite everything being so garish, it works, it
works for me.It excites me,
it thrills me, it puzzles me, it sits on my mind.

I am writing this in response to Mark at Henrimag and Paul
from Paulcorio and the mysterious Anonymous who some of us know quite well not
only because of his pertinent commentary but also because we’ve spent many
nights and days talking about art and getting drunk both literally and
figuratively.

I have a problem with Modernism and hence
Post-Modernism.To me they are
interesting theories of cultural production and arts placement in culture at
large.

The problem with Picasso or Miró for that matter is that
they don’t fit into convenient categories of modernist art production, nor does
Duchamp for that matter.The
American version of Modernism has Clem Greenberg’s shadow still haunting it, at
least for someone of my age and generation, because we or I, was over-steeped
in it from schooling.The
conceptual and minimal works that came out of it owe more than a passing debt
to Clem, even if as reaction.Not surprising too because painting as an “avant-garde” practice was
pretty much exhausted by 1920 and the rest since, mining familiar territories.

By 1920 cubism had morphed into synthetic cubism, Matisse
had gone to Nice and began riffing on Cezanne and his own work, now that I
think of it, the proto-Soviets were the ones who radicalized vision along with
the Dutch.By 1920 Malevich
and Rodchenko had along with the De Stijl group of Mondrian et al had given the
non-objective a face and their work in particular was one of revolutionary
import, they were radicals who desired to shape and change culture through
their art.The French and I
include Picasso and Miró in this, not so much, I mean what’s wrong with Café
culture?

Listen I don’t want to delve into some deeper analysis but
my feeling and my head tell me that what is dead, is not so much the
avant-garde or modernism or post-modernism because they were never alive to
begin with, they are nothing more than anthropomorphic descriptions of historical
processes, made by man for man in an attempt to understand and come to grips
with the working processes of other people coming to grips with themselves
through their work within certain time frames that at once shaped and defined
them and then they tried to break through those limitations, limitations put on
by the expectations at large and the ones that they had imposed on themselves
and of major importance but rarely discussed is the death of god and the
poetic, what is dead is what was never alive, a theory or theories.

What the various artists had in common despite the
incredible variety of visual expression was each artist was trying to come to
grips with the ghost of art and the substrate in which it can be hung
within.The various stories
or myths that each artist had, whether it was Duchamp and the fourth dimension
and more and the eros that many rarely talk about but he hinted at consistently
Rrose Sélavy, Mondrian’s Theosophy, the relationship between Constructivism and
Russian Icon painting, Picasso with the history of art and Matisse with the
arcadian joie de vivre.

Their art was an art born out of life, not naïve life (maybe
at times) but also a love of art.

Today’s art gymnastics, the kind that fills us with dread is
the post-mortem, cynical market place driven drivel.One, driven by an academy of dead wood and no better than
the church in trying to force an ideal or idea of what it is without the love
or poetry, two concepts too fuzzy and akin to ‘feeling.’

The problem with theory is that it takes place in words,
don’t get me wrong I love words, look ma, I’m using them now but the best
wordsmiths and the best painters artists etc know when they are having fun with
their media in trying to expand the field of expression not for the accolades
but because they or we are trying to find the best way to relay or transmit
this weird feeling or idea that we have about the world to someone else.

We don’t make art to fit the academy or the school, October
or Artforum, MoMA or the New Museum.That is where art goes to die, stuffed and on the
wall.This was the point, by the great and greatly misunderstood Marcel Broodthaers.

Oh and Picasso, I’ll try to get back to him shortly as I
started writing something but got sidetracked by life.

1 comment:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?